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While My Guitar Gently Beeps

GAME MAN Alex Rigopulos, a founder and the C.E.O. of Harmonix Music Systems. Big eyes
(reflected from a photo in his Boston office) were watching.Credit
Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

GILES MARTIN WAS conjuring spirits, or perhaps summoning gods. The tools for this ritual included a pair of omnidirectional microphones, a digital mixing console and a hastily-procured set of teacups and saucers, but the magic was in the room itself. Studio Two at Abbey Road in London has changed very little since 1969, when Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded together for the last time. The Steinway upright McCartney played on “Lady Madonna” still stands in one corner, its middle keys worn to the wood. Sound-absorbing quilts hang in wide stripes down the whitewashed brick walls. The view from the control room on the second level is much as it would have been for George Martin, Giles’s father, who oversaw the creation of nearly every Beatles album from this room. Giles held a slender finger to his lips, which turned up into a playful grin. He handed cups and saucers to three people nearby and mimed a sip. The others followed his lead, and a few feet away the microphones captured the small clattering sound of four people drinking tea.

The odd recording session in March was one very small contribution to what Apple Corps — the company still controlled by McCartney, Starr and the widows of Lennon and Harrison — hopes will be the most deeply immersive way ever of experiencing the music and the mythology of the Beatles. The band that upended the cultural landscape of the 1960s is now hitching its legacy to the medium of a new generation: the video game.

The sound effects Martin recorded are not anything most people who play the game will notice consciously. The Beatles: Rock Band, which is to be released on Sept. 9, involves playing ersatz instruments in time with the band’s original music. Between songs, players will hear the group warming up and bantering in the studio. Martin combed through hundreds of hours of tape to find these clips, but the chatter, recorded directly into microphones, lacked the subtle echo and ambient noise you would have heard if you were actually in the studio at the time. So after laying down a sound bed of background noise, Martin played the original clips through a set of speakers on the studio floor and rerecorded them through his mikes, this time with all the ringing acoustics of the room. Through the control-room window, Martin stared into the empty studio as if his mind’s eye could put physical form to the disembodied sounds. Across the decades a guitar was tuned, a snare drum rattled and John Lennon warmed up his voice for a new song called “Come Together”: “He got teenage lyrics, he got hot rod baldy.’’

Martin is a youthful 39, with his father’s patrician accent but also a rakish demeanor that more recalls the young Lennon. “When they first approached me, I thought, Do I really want to do a plastic-guitar Beatles game?” he said. He was persuaded to do so, he told me, after seeing how the games intensify people’s engagement with music. “In the same way we listened to records over and over again,” he observed, “because I don’t think kids do that anymore. They’ve got too much other stuff competing for their attention.”

THE EVENTS THAT The Beatles: Rock Band recreates and reimagines are not just stepping stones in the career of a band but transformational shifts in the history of popular music. “I Saw Her Standing There” at the Cavern Club in Liverpool put a cheerful spin on the sexual swagger of American rock ’n’ roll. A 1964 “Ed Sullivan” appearance drew a larger audience than any television broadcast before it. That same year, “A Hard Day’s Night” pioneered the visual style that would later define MTV. The Shea Stadium concert in 1965 was at the time the largest rock show at an outdoor stadium. And then there were the years of experimentation at Abbey Road, when the Beatles rewrote the rules for what rock ’n’ roll could be.

Nearly 20 years after their breakup, the Beatles helped kick the compact-disc era into overdrive in 1987, as their reissued catalog again climbed the charts. The band’s remastered CDs coming next month will most likely be the last important milestone for that technology. In the current era of downloadable music, financial disputes have kept the Beatles conspicuously sidelined. That’s one reason so much care is going into the new video game. While over the years there has been no shortage of Beatles merchandise, some of it crass, the decision to release the game on the same date as the new CDs is, as well as an irresistible marketing tactic, a signal that the game is meant to be an authentic part of the band’s canon (as is McCartney’s decision to show footage from the game during his current American tour). The Beatles are positioning themselves to once again play a significant role in the evolution of popular music — this time by embracing interactivity.

“We’re on the precipice of a culture shift around how the mass market experiences music,” Alex Rigopulos told me recently. Rigopulos is the 39-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Harmonix Music Systems, which developed The Beatles: Rock Band and created the original Rock Band and Guitar Hero games that are its foundations. Although video games are associated more with guns than with guitars, music games are now the second-most-popular type on the market, ahead of sports and not far behind the traditional action category. The first Guitar Hero game came out in 2005. Two years later, Harmonix, now owned by MTV, introduced Rock Band. Together, Guitar Hero and Rock Band (now rival franchises owned by competing companies) have altered the way fans relate to music.

Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition. “When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it,” Rigopulos went on to say. Paul McCartney said much the same thing when I spoke with him in June. “That’s what you want,” he told me. “You want people to get engaged.” McCartney sees the game as “a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the ’60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”

Music games are also a serious business. Together, Rock Band and Guitar Hero have earned more than $3 billion. The money comes not just from initial sales but also from a continuing stream of new songs that can be downloaded for about $2 a piece. The Rock Band catalog contains more than 800 songs by bands as disparate as the Grateful Dead and Megadeth. Early on, artists noticed that people were discovering music in games and then buying it elsewhere. On iTunes, downloads of the 1978 Cheap Trick song “Surrender” tripled after it appeared in Guitar Hero 2, and sales of a 1994 Weezer song from Guitar Hero 3 increased tenfold. Increasingly, games are also seen as a significant distribution platform in their own right. In its first week, Motley Crue’s 2008 single “Saints of Los Angeles” sold nearly five times as many copies on Rock Band as it did on iTunes, and at twice the price. Next month, Pearl Jam plans to release its new album simultaneously on CD and in Rock Band.In perhaps the surest sign that the music industry has started to take games seriously, feuds have erupted over which parties are stealing the others’ profits.

Photo

NO. 1 SON Giles Martin, who oversaw the audio portion of The Beatles: Rock Band, in Abbey Road Studios. He is the son
of George Martin, who oversaw most of the Beatles real-life audio.Credit
Finlay MacKay for The New York Times

At the moment, the game companies decide which music to sell, and there is a bottleneck of record labels pushing to get their artists into the games. But last month Harmonix announced that it will license software tools and provide training for anyone to create and distribute interactive versions of their own songs on a new Rock Band Network, which will drastically expand the amount and variety of interactive music available. Already the Sub Pop label, which released the first Nirvana album, has said it plans to put parts of its catalog and future releases into game format. The Rock Band Network is so potentially consequential that Harmonix went to great lengths to keep its development secret, including giving it the unofficial in-house code name Rock Band: Nickelback, on the theory that the name of the quintessentially generic modern rock group would be enough to deflect all curiosity. After a polite gesture in the direction of modesty, Rigopulos predicted, “We’re really going to explode this thing to be the new music industry.” People who have never played a video game will buy The Beatles: Rock Band, he said, and once they do, they’ll want interactive songs from their other favorite artists. “As huge as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been over the past few years, I still think we’re on the shy side of the chasm,” Rigopulos maintains, “because the Beatles have a reach and power that transcends any other band.”

A CYLINDER FITTED with metal pins can be aligned next to a steel comb with teeth of varying lengths in such a manner that when an unwinding spring causes the cylinder to rotate, the pins will strike the teeth in a predefined sequence, producing a melodic ring.

This technically accurate description of a music box utterly fails to convey the charming effect of opening one up and watching a little ballerina twirl around to the tune. Similarly, an explanation of Rock Band and Guitar Hero will leave most people who have never played them perplexed as to the attraction. The games, a hybrid of simplified sight reading and Simon Says, are operated using controllers shaped like undersize instruments — toy guitars with five colored buttons on the fret board and a drum kit with colored pads and a foot pedal. Players watch their TV screens as colored shapes corresponding to the notes or drum beats of a song cascade toward a target. Hit the proper buttons when the shapes reach the target, and the song plays back perfectly. Time things badly or hit the wrong buttons and your virtual band, represented by animated figures, will butcher the music, dropping chords or playing horrible grating sounds. There’s also a microphone, but while you can earn points for singing with proper pitch and timing, any cacophony from failing to do so is entirely your own doing.

While all of this may sound tedious or pointless, the games can perform an incredible alchemy. Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. “You feel like you’re creating music,” she marveled. “It must engage some creative part of your brain.” McCartney also quickly understood the game’s appeal. “Miming was always fun,” he told me. “When I was growing up, there was always, on TV, people who mimed to records. It was a thing people did. I always admired the way they had to learn every little nuance.”

McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.” That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.”

The Beatles: Rock Band follows the group’s career from Liverpool to the concert on the roof of Apple Corps in London in 1969, which marks the band’s end in the public imagination. The first half of the game recreates famous live performances; the second half weaves psychedelic “dreamscapes” around animations of the Beatles recording in Studio Two. By now it has become an almost mythical arc: when the Beatles rose to fame, rock ’n’ roll was a live medium. A rock album was essentially a take-home version of a concert. But the frenzy of Beatlemania overwhelmed the Beatles and their music. In response, the band refocused its talent and energy on studio recordings and created a new paradigm: lush, elaborately produced rock music that not only didn’t try to create an illusion of live performance but also couldn’t be played live at all, and that very pointedly sprung from the artists’ private space without the interference or involvement of fans. In a sense, the two phases of the band’s career are now being reconciled with an interactive game. The fan again becomes an active part of the process, but in the service of teasing out the intricacies of the studio productions.

IN 2006 GILES Martin worked alongside his father to produce a collection of Beatles remixes and mash-ups for “Love,” the Las Vegas revue by Cirque du Soleil. At the time he was mildly alarmed that the Beatles’ original master tapes, while meticulously catalogued and preserved, had never been backed up. Apple Corps’ most precious resources are stored in a vault on the lower level of Abbey Road behind a massive steel door marked only with a sign that reads, dubiously, “Danger: High Voltage.” Martin enlisted Abbey Road engineers to create pristine digital copies of every tape, a task that made his job on The Beatles: Rock Band easier.

To turn classic Beatles songs into the stages of a video game, each song needed to be separated into its several components, so that if the person playing the guitar misses a note, the guitar sound can drop out while the music made by the other instruments is unaffected. Because the Beatles mostly recorded on four-track and two-track equipment, with multiple instruments sharing a tape, Martin had to spend months using digital filters to eliminate sounds at certain frequencies and not others. This work was done at Abbey Road but not in Studio Two. Mainly Martin worked in the less-iconic Room 52 down the hall, next to the men’s room. Apple’s preoccupation with security meant that the high-quality audio “stems” he created never left Abbey Road. If the separated parts leaked out, every amateur D.J. would start lacing mixes with unauthorized Beatles samples. Instead, Martin created low-fidelity copies imprinted with static for the Harmonix team to take back to the States — in their carry-on luggage. They were just good enough to work with until the game coding could be brought back to Abbey Road and attached to the actual songs.

Sitting in front of his Mac in March, Martin explained that when choosing the 45 songs that come with the game, priority was given to the ones that would be most fun to play, rather than to the band’s most iconic numbers. He clicked the mouse and played a snatch of “Paperback Writer.” In the game, “Paperback Writer” comes toward the end of the live era — in a sequence inspired by, but not an exact simulation of, the Beatles’ concerts at Budokan. The 1966 Japan shows were recorded, but there was no thought of using the live versions in the game. Martin dragged in another file and clicked play. Compared with the familiar, crisp recording on the single,“Paperback Writer” at Budokan is a mess — faster but less energetic, as if the Beatles were just trying to get the song over with. The harmonies are off, and the drumming is sloppy. The screaming audience doesn’t help.

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1, 2, 3, 4!
Harmonix employees playing The Beatles: Rock Band at
the E3 Expo in Los Angeles in June.Credit
Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times

Martin stopped the playback. “If that was your version of ‘Paperback Writer’ in the game,” he said, “you probably wouldn’t be that happy.” Instead he took the studio version, layered on the crowd noises at a less-intrusive volume and grafted on the final chord of the live performance to replace the studio fade-out. Listening to it again now he decided that the drums sounded too “squashed” for an arena show. That compression, in which the loudest parts of a song are turned down while the quiet parts are untouched, results in an artificially even sound — an effect of Abbey Road’s 1950s equipment that is treasured by Beatlephiles. But Martin planned to rerun the original tracks through the compressors again — or rather, through software emulations — with the settings readjusted. He described his remixes as the opposite of what that word usually connotes. “My approach is actually to make things less processed,” he said, “so you hear the band playing as opposed to people in the studio working.”

Martin is one of the few people trusted with such artistic decisions. People who have professional dealings with Olivia Harrison, Yoko Ono and the two remaining Beatles refer to the foursome as “the shareholders.” Each one has veto power over any aspect of any project that goes out under the Beatles name. “They are deeply concerned about how they are perceived, and rightly so,” Martin said. “I think people’s perception is that they would go: ‘O.K., you want to do a video game of us? It’s going to cost you however many million dollars, yeah, fine.’ But with Apple it doesn’t work like that. They form a partnership. They go, ‘If you’re going to do this, we’re going to do it with you.’ ” McCartney told me that his role in the project was “executive tweaker,” but the better title might be watchdog. “It’s not open season on their music,” Martin said. “I can’t just go, ‘Well, I thought this would be cool.’ ”

In many respects, Martin and the Harmonix developers obsessed over creating an accurate portrayal of the Beatles. (They were never without teacups in the studio!) But they also made changes that polish the Beatles’ mythology at the expense of realism. “Paperback Writer” live really was a mess. That’s not trivial, if you want to understand the Beatles’ legacy. Difficulty playing their material live is a reason that they stopped touring. But Martin is adamant that an accurate depiction of a mid-’60s Beatles concert would be a mistake. “This isn’t an archival project, it’s a game,” he said. “It’s entertainment. That’s what they were doing here in the first place. Later, people attached all sorts of significance to it, but they’d be the first to tell you that what they wanted most was to entertain people.”

So for all the painstaking work that went into, for example, making sure the pockets on the Beatles’ matching suits were properly placed, quite a few of the more complicated facets of the band’s career have been smoothed over to project what Martin calls a “fantasy version” of four lads who were always in harmony. You won’t see Eric Clapton playing on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” or Paul playing drums as he did on some of the White Album when Ringo went AWOL, or any of the band recording their parts separately as they did frequently during their troubled years. Not to mention that the virtual John does not wheel a bed into Studio Two for a virtual Yoko. In the hermetic, idealized world of The Beatles: Rock Band, the Apple rooftop performance isn’t an emotionally fraught grasp at a vanishing past; it’s just a gig — despite the unique opportunities a video game might present. (“Well, there is a death match,” Martin joked. “It’s the breakup. They push each other off the roof.”)

DHANI HARRISON, who is George Harrison’s son and the lead singer and songwriter of his own band, thenewno2, was one of the first people to see the potential for a Beatles video game. Harrison was 28 in December 2006, and like many gamers he spent much of his vacation that winter glued to the just-released Guitar Hero 2. At a holiday party he found himself sitting next to Van Toffler, a top executive at MTV, which had recently acquired Harmonix for $175 million. Harrison began telling Toffler about his idea for a game like Guitar Hero but with more instruments. Toffler told him, “I think you should meet Alex.”

Alex Rigopulos and Harmonix were already working on the game that would become Rock Band. When he did get together with Harrison, it was inevitable that the idea of a Beatles version would come up. Harrison became instrumental in selling Apple on the project. One factor that helped win over the company was the way the game requires players to make a commitment of time, effort and energy. It demands attention in an era when music has largely become sonic wallpaper. “Record labels have allowed music to become this lifestyle accessory,” Paul DeGooyer, an MTV Games executive, told Apple executives in an early meeting. “The iPod is more important than the songs on it.” Younger generations, he said, “are missing out on the experience of what, for example, the Beatles meant to me.”

The shareholders were intrigued. But the real draw was not “carrying on the Beatles music” for a new generation, Yoko Ono told me not long ago. The music would see to its own immortality. Rather it was the possibility of stretching creatively, something the “Love” show had given them a taste for. Ono liked how the game would give the Beatles’ music a dimension of physicality. “It’s like dancing,” she said, or even “a very strong active meditation.” Olivia Harrison was drawn to the graphics that overlay the game, and she knew that if the game was successful it could define how an entire generation saw Beatles music in their heads, just as anyone who has seen “Yellow Submarine” associates the songs from that film with the imagery attached to them. McCartney also knew better than to underestimate a new medium’s growing influence and potential. “I’ve seen enough things that should never have become art become art that this looks like a prime candidate to me if ever there was one,” he told me. “Rock ’n’ roll, or the Beatles, started as just sort of hillbilly music, just a passing phase, but now it’s revered as an art form because so much has been done in it. Same with comics, and I think same with video games.”

After the deal was sealed, Apple invited members of the Harmonix staff to the New York premiere of a documentary film about the making of the “Love” show. Josh Randall, who would oversee The Beatles: Rock Band as project director, watched with increasing terror scenes of the shareholders tearing into the Cirque du Soleil directors as they struggled to live up to the standards and specifications of Beatledom. “I’m going to be that little French guy crying in the corner,” he thought.

SIX-TWENTY-FIVE Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge is not, even among gamers, a cultural landmark like Abbey Road. Fans of Rock Band do not scrawl messages of peace and love on its wall or photograph one another walking barefoot across the street out front. One of the hippest game developers in the country is headquartered in a characterless brick building above a Walgreens.

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Inside, the space comes to life with the chaotic energy of a company that in two years has expanded from 80 employees to more than 300. The haphazard décor is an appropriate fusion of rock and geek, and there is a full-scale tchotchke arms race on. At every desk, shelves spill over with anime figurines and vintage sci-fi toys. Electric guitars, real and plastic, lean precariously against amplifiers.

Alex Rigopulos studied composition and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met Eran Egozy, with whom he founded Harmonix in 1996. “Everyone comes into the world with this innate desire to make music,” Rigopulos said, “and almost everyone tries to learn an instrument at some point. And the overwhelming majority of these people quit after a few months or a few years because it is just too damn difficult. They spend the rest of their lives loving music, and listening to music, and playing a lot of air guitar, but not having any outlet for that innate urge they feel.”

Where many people would conclude that having that outlet is a privilege to be earned by not quitting music lessons, Rigopulos and Egozy didn’t think that was fair. They devised ingenious tools that allowed people with no training to compose music on the fly and discovered a principle that would guide future development of this nascent medium: Most people don’t want to compose their own music. What nonmusicians want, it turned out, is a sense of what it’s like to perform the music they already love. Rigopulos and Egozy hit on the idea of using a game interface to interact with prerecorded music. Critics were impressed, but the public found these early games too abstract. Harmonix finally found success with a series of karaoke games, and then with Guitar Hero, in which the addition of the guitar-shaped controller was transformative. A musician himself, Rigopulos is familiar with the feeling that comes from performing. “A game like Rock Band,” he said with satisfaction, “gets you maybe 50 percent of the way there with 3 percent of the effort.”

Where some might have seen a gimmick or a fad, Rigopulos saw the next link in the chain of music history. “When there were no record players, what you had was the people or person in the house who knew how to render sheet music into music on their pianos,” he said. “I actually on some levels see what we are doing now as a massive historical throwback to the time in which the way people experienced music that they loved was as active participants in the music.”

Still, the overt selling point of Guitar Hero was less participatory music experience than rock-god fantasy. It leaned heavily on the over-the-top energy of heavy metal and punk, and came wrapped in a cartoonish aesthetic. Harmonix toned down these elements with the Rock Band series and dipped into less-aggressive musical artists like Beck, Bob Dylan, the Go-Gos and the Replacements, taking some risk of alienating the games’ core audience. Rock Band also switched the emphasis from competition to cooperation, further confounding the expectations of some gamers. The Beatles project is an even greater departure from the elements that initially made music games successful. (While the Beatles were godlike, they were not what people call rock gods.) As a reminder of the stakes, several staff members have affixed over their work spaces a color photocopy of Paul McCartney pointing at the camera and the warning, “Don’t foul this up.” (Actually, only one of these posters says “foul,” where the employee, like an editor at a family newspaper, has taped it over the original word.)

For all the subdivisions of the Harmonix headquarters — warrens of cubicles and offices broken up by soundproof testing spaces and conference rooms named for defunct Boston rock clubs — there are two broad elements of The Beatles: Rock Band to which most of the efforts there contribute. The first is the stylized notation that players focus on as they try to keep up with their plastic guitars, drums and microphones. The second is the background animation of the Beatles performing— animation that is not, strictly speaking, necessary, at least not if you believe the purpose of a video game is to score points through technical proficiency. But Harmonix considers itself as much a music company as a game company, and its products hark back to more visual musical eras — the LP cover art of the ’60s and ’70s, or the MTV videos that redefined pop music in the ’80s.Much of the animation is intended less for the people playing than for the family members and friends who are watching or hanging around waiting for their turn.

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Like roughly 80 percent of the creative team, Eric Brosius, Harmonix’s director of audio, is an active musician, something the company values and encourages — employees can take time off for tour leave. The audio department’s primary job is to map out which buttons players have to press to play back the music. Drums are straightforward. On the expert difficulty level, every time Ringo Starr hits a drum, the player is asked to do the same. But very few Rock Band players ever reach expert, and the challenge to designers is what beats to take out for the easier levels. Players still hear Starr’s syncopations and fills without having to match them.

Nearby, a sound designer and trained drummer was at work on his computer, tagging each of the colored dots that represented drumbeats with information that would automate how the animated Ringo’s hands should move in order to play them: which drum on his kit should he hit, how hard and with which hand, given his peculiar ambidextrous style? “The big thing is how he leads with his left hand, and trying to figure out how he would have done a roll going down the kit,” said the designer. “We look for footage to see if we can figure out what he’s doing.” Earlier Alex Rigopulos told me, “Ringo is going to earn a lot more admirers when this gets out in the world and people see how sophisticated and challenging some of his drumbeats actually are.” I asked the sound designer if he had new appreciation for the Beatles’ drummer. “Yeah,” he said, somewhat tentatively. “I was always, like, more a Stones guy.”

Because most Beatles songs have more than one guitar part, the audio team created a fantasy guitar line that incorporates all of them, following the part that is most fun to play with colored fret buttons and a plastic strum bar at any given moment. Programming for guitar “just by its nature is more abstract,” Brosius said. “We don’t have strings, and we only have five positions.” His team tried to create patterns that mimic the way an actual guitarist would move up and down the fret board and keep the assignments of notes to buttons consistent throughout a song.As with drums, the audio team codes the guitar and bass tracks with information about which character is playing at that moment, what chord the fingers should be forming on which part of the fret board and which of 10 different strums they should use. (To animate singing, vocals are slowed down, and each discrete sound is identified so that software and animators can determine the facial movement associated with making it.)

Photo

Ryan Lesser, art director.Credit
Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

Getting started, the art department had weekly viewings of the eight-part “Beatles Anthology” documentary. They created a forum on the internal computer network to post photos they found on the Internet or in the Apple archives and sketches of their own for others to comment on. One early rendering of a chubby-cheeked Paul McCartney was appended with an image of the Campbell’s-soup boy: too cute.

McCartney himself expressed hope that with the technology available, the characters could look hyperrealistic, like figures from the “Star Trek” holodeck. Harmonix came at it from the opposite direction, starting out with cartoony caricatures of the band and then scaling back the exaggerated features until they hit what felt like a proper balance between whimsical and realistic. To make sure the characters moved properly, Harmonix hired Beatles tribute bands and filmed them wearing motion-capture suits.

A week before my visit, Yoko Ono spent a day at Harmonix, tweaking. “Stop talking about the technology,” Rigopulos said she told them. “Let’s talk about the idea of what we are trying to accomplish here. John needs to own the performance, he needs to own the room. Where he’s looking and the look in his eye at every moment matters and affects people.” For the developers who were in the late stages of work and more than a little burned out, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant visit. “You can’t tell a computer, ‘Make his eyes look good,’ ” one artist pointed out to me. “You have to create a quantifiable system,” plotting “interest points” in key places and programming characters to look at those points at key times, say, at the other singer when they both lean in to the microphone, or at the camera when it passes by. Ono told me later that “John had this look that showed he was high-spirited and strong-willed,” which wasn’t coming through in the game.

Just as Giles Martin chose to walk a line between reality and fantasy when choosing and mixing the audio, Harmonix put an extraordinary amount of research toward a result that is at once meticulously detailed and purposefully ahistorical. They pored over reference books to determine which instruments the Beatles used on each song and studied photos of concert venues and their respective crowds in order to properly render 1960s fashion and hairstyles. When Olivia Harrison was worried that George looked a bit off, she invited the art team over to look through her personal photo archive — with a set of calipers. And when the designer of the guitar-shaped instrument controllers couldn’t find a high-resolution photo showing the wood grain on McCartney’s Höfner violin bass, he had the Höfner company send over a block.

Yet time and again there were places where compromise became necessary. Choosing to include “I’m Looking Through You,” a song the band never actually performed live, in the band’s Shea Stadium set meant having John play acoustic guitar on stage, even though the real concert was all electric. The later songs, set in Studio Two, essentially present as single, four-minute performances what were sometimes hours of multiple takes and overdubs, often tricked out with engineering effects. (The designers took their cue from a film the Beatles shot for the song “Hey Bulldog,” in which the actual recording session was artfully edited into a single take.) The psychedelic dreamscapes that enhance the studio period already suggest that the Beatles were travelers in an alternate space-time continuum rather than products of a particular cultural context. The blending of tiny doses of illusion into a portrayal that so adamantly declares its authenticity results in mythologizing.

McCartney said he believed this larger- and neater-than-life portrayal is the appropriate one. “I think it reflects where the Beatles are at,” he said. “We are halfway between reality and mythology.” But it is one thing to show the band playing as a seamless organism on “Hey Bulldog.” It’s slightly different to do so on “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” when Starr wasn’t even there, Harrison was fuming about being underappreciated and Lennon and McCartney were wielding their songs as weapons against each other. “This wasn’t during their happiest time,” acknowledges Chris Foster, the game’s lead designer. Again his team turned to a promotional film the Beatles themselves made, for “Revolution.” Lennon recorded the propulsive single version of the song in pointed response to the verdict by the rest of the band that his original arrangement was too slow. They filmed the song for British television, which allowed them to use prerecorded music but had rules against lip-synching. In order for Lennon to sing the first verse, he had to let McCartney take over his signature opening scream, and McCartney and Harrison chose to sing the background vocals from “the Glenn Miller version,” as it was dismissively called by Abbey Road engineers. “They worked together to make the right performance and to adapt their songs to the medium,” Foster said. “When it came time to put on a show, they put on a show.”

PEOPLE WHO PLAY Rock Band and Guitar Hero like to post videos of their efforts to YouTube. Almost inevitably, these attract comments like the following:

“pick up a real guitar”

“lets see you get a life, and actually get out of the house instead of been a loser and trying to show off with your ‘skill’ to touch plastic”

“you dont rock your a sad loser whos never gonna loose his virginity”

There is something about music video games that infuriates people. The hostility comes largely from musicians, although many people who enjoy these games are musicians themselves. Even people who are not offended by the games are frequently baffled by them. Olivia Harrison admits that her husband’s response to Rock Band probably would have been, “Why don’t they play real guitars?”

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels. The disparagement of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, then, suggests that music games do resemble actual performance, at least enough so that people feel the need to point out that they are not. Indeed a common defense of Rock Band is that it does teach musical fundamentals or at least inspires people to upgrade to proper instruments. MTV Games’ Paul DeGooyer likens Rock Band to the Kodaly method of music instruction, which assigned hand symbols to do-re-mi and involves using rhythmic tapping as pedagogical building blocks.

Photo

A Harmonix team member working on a Beatles:
Rock Band guitar.Credit
Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

Kiri Miller, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Brown University who studies video-game music, says the two most common responses to the game are equally misguided. “Either these games are supposed to be teaching you some fabulous skill that we can celebrate or they are supposed to be having some terrible deleterious effect and turning you into some kind of automaton,” she told me. Instead of thinking of the games in relation, good or bad, to traditional performance, she finds them “compelling in and of themselves as a new form of musical experience.”

The hostility that people have toward Rock Band and Guitar Hero, she adds, is an expression of schizophonic anxiety — “schizophonia” being the composer R. Murray Schafer’s word for the split between music and its source, first coined 40 years ago to explain why an earlier generation was deeply troubled by the advent of recorded music. The way people came to terms with the phenomenon of recording, Miller explains, “was to create these really sharp distinctions between the live and the recorded. So we know what’s live, and it has its particular value and authenticity; and we know what’s recorded, and it also eventually has its particular value and authenticity.” Music gaming disturbs people because it upends those distinctions by adding to recorded music “this component of physical bodily performance that we think of as being a hallmark of liveness.”

Scorn for music gaming is thus related to scorn for lip synching. Miller, who identifies the games as “rock drag,” says it’s no coincidence that so much of the online vitriol takes the form of homophobic slurs, or that Guitar Hero was mocked by “South Park” as Guitar Queer-o. “I want to be careful not to drag us too deep into the valley of queer theory,” she said, before going on to explain that the hatred of Rock Band likely has something to do with people using their bodies in a way that fails to match expectations — they’re obviously not playing music, but it sure looks and sounds as if they are — and doing so in a way that is simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and sincere. For the Beatles to embrace this transgressive and supposedly juvenile and nerdy medium in such a public way is “a benediction” that only history’s most important rock group could give, Miller says. “I fully expect it may help me get more grants.”

In trying to create a new type of musical experience, Harmonix may also end up transforming the video-game experience. In describing The Beatles: Rock Band, Josh Randall, the creative director, uses words not often associated with games: “It is subtle, and it is sweet, and it is very embracing.” Alex Rigopulos said: “This game isn’t about winning. That’s generally not done in big mainstream games.” In the original Rock Band, you play gigs to earn money to buy a tour bus, etc. The Beatles version has no such overarching goals to achieve; it is “an experiential journey,” where rewards are doled out in the form of rare photos and trivia. You also do not play as any particular character. In Rock Band and Guitar Hero, there are avatars that represent the player. If you’re playing guitar in the Beatles game, however, you’ll most likely be playing along with George one moment and John the next. This was a design necessity, but one Harmonix embraced because it kept the focus on the songs. “You’re not trying to be a Beatle,” Chris Foster, the lead designer, said. “You are experiencing this music a little bit from the inside but also still as a fan.” The game is also relatively easy, which many gamers will see as a failing. But hard-core players who scoff at the lack of fiendish solos will miss the point. It “doesn’t look very complicated, and yet you’re hearing this perfect song,” Olivia Harrison told me. The cascading notes won’t always challenge an expert’s fingers, but they may help him or her see, literally, how the Beatles arranged simple musical components into gemlike melodies.

“It seems mature, like not in a derogatory way,” added Foster, who works in an industry where “rated M for mature” usually indicates excessive gore. That’s appropriate, considering that it was the Beatles who introduced sonic and intellectual complexity to rock ’n’ roll and developed it beyond the confines of the three-minute radio hit. “This is definitely legitimate art,” Yoko Ono said of Rock Band. “A lot of artwork that I’m doing is always audience-participation.” She considers the game in the same tradition as her 1964 book, “Grapefruit,” which sought to create communal happenings through simple instructions, on the theory that art gains meaning by being shared. (“A dream you dream alone may be a dream," she wrote, "but a dream two people dream together is a reality.”)

“The music itself has a very strong power,” Ono said, “but that’s not as powerful as what people put in there for themselves.”

On the other hand, it’s possible the Beatles are simply too sacred an institution to be the catalyst for this new medium to reach its full potential. Rigopulos is right when he says there are no other artists with a broad-enough appeal and a rich-enough body of work to instantly expand the audience for interactive music. Yet precisely because of that, Harmonix had to “dial back” some of the interactive elements of its previous games, he acknowledges. Unlike in Rock Band, the Beatles game will afford players no opportunities to throw in quick drum fills or guitar flourishes of their own making. Harmonix’s earliest creations were about pure improvisation, and though these were unsuccessful, Rigopulos said he didn’t believe that meant interactive music games of the future would be as constrained as they are now. “There’s a spectrum between total freedom and total limitation. It hasn’t really been explored yet.” But if Rock Band took small steps into the future of more freedom, the Beatles version takes some big ones back.

For instance, in Rock Band and Guitar Hero, being booed offstage for a bad performance is so compellingly humiliating that it does perhaps more than anything else in the games to foster the illusion of performance. The Beatles, however, cannot be booed off the stage — how preposterous would that be? — soinstead the game cuts to a “Song Failed” screen.And if a player does well, the audience does not start singing along, another powerful tool in the earlier games’ feedback system. Once the Beatles enter the studio period, there isn’t even an audience to cheer louder for a well-performed solo. Fans of music gaming may find the near absence of feedback eerie. Meanwhile, the decision to make the Beatles game a “walled garden” from which songs cannot be exported and added to a party mix alongside other Rock Band tunes violates the central shuffle-and-personalize ethos of modern music consumption.

And while Harmonix sells most Rock Band downloads in the form of individual songs completely removed from the context of their original release, the downloadable Beatles music will be presented in the form of the band’s complete albums (although people will still be able to buy individual songs from the records). The first three albums scheduled for release are “Rubber Soul,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road.” The Beatles’ music may be best served by the philosophy of its own era, when artists constructed and controlled packages of music designed to be experienced in a precise way. But surely the promise of interactive music is that listeners — participants — will be able to add their own personalities to their favorite songs, adjusting and improvising on themes created by the musicians. If interactive music is to truly evolve, it may require more adventurous artists willing to set their songs free and embrace the consequences.

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Chris Foster, the games lead designer.Credit
Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

PAUL MCCARTNEY WAS cutting it close. It was the day before the E3 video-game convention in Los Angeles in June, and MTV Games was planning to kick off the festivities by unveiling The Beatles: Rock Band with a surprise appearance by all four shareholders. On the concrete loading dock behind the stage at a football stadium done up in the glowing green circles of the Xbox 360, everyone waited. It was 10:15 a.m., and someone had just heard from someone else that McCartney was on his way and would be there for his cue at 10:30. Alex Rigopulos spoke quietly with Giles Martin. Dhani Harrison greeted a succession of people, bowing slightly as he shook hands. Yoko Ono arrived, and Olivia Harrison welcomed her with a hug.

Inside his trailer, Ringo Starr sat quietly with his legs crossed in front of a makeup mirror. “It took me a while to understand downloading,” he said. “The last record was a wristband.” (His 2008 album, “Liverpool 8,” was released in the unlikely format of a USB drive that doubles as a bracelet, as well as on CD and MP3.) “The game is the biggest thing in the world right now, they tell me.”

Peering over his rectangular tinted glasses, Starr admitted that he’d tried to play Rock Band only once: “It’s impossible. I cannot watch the line going down and play at the same time.” The problem, he suggested, is that he’s a musician. People who like Rock Band, “they’re playing a game, they’re not making music. The music is already made.” The game, it seemed, perplexed him a little. “The kids are getting really great at this game,” he said, “but they couldn’t suddenly go and play the Staples Center.”

At 10:25, McCartney drove up behind the wheel of a blue Corvette. He put his arm around Ono and walked with her toward the stage. Inside the hall, MTV’s Van Toffler called out Dhani Harrison, then Olivia Harrison and Ono, and then, after they waved to the audience and retreated, he introduced McCartney and Starr, who danced onto the stage to the tune of “All You Need Is Love.”

In front of the crowd, Starr turned to McCartney. “So what do you think of the game?”

“I love it.”

“You love it?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K.” Starr turned forward again and took a deep, theatrical bow. “Thank you!”

The audience roared. The entire appearance lasted 75 seconds.

When it was over, McCartney returned to his trailer for a cup of tea with soy milk and sugar. At 67, McCartney, even up close, is still unmistakably the cute one. He smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling, and unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Like Starr, he volunteered that he can’t play his own game, but he suspects that if it had been around when he was a kid, he would have liked it.

Would he have liked it too much? I asked. If his drive to play rock ’n’ roll had been satiated by a 1950s Guitar Hero, would the world have been robbed of the Beatles? “I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. “Knowing me and knowing my ambition.” He thought for a bit, then added that any kid who is going to become a musician anyway won’t decide to stop with a game. “They’ll get the Beatles down, but then if they’re that into music, they’ll just hook up with friends, like they do, and say, let’s try to write one of our own. I think that’ll always happen.”

The teacup clattered quietly on its saucer, and McCartney thought about the changes he’d seen in the music world. “There were no cassette recorders” when he and Lennon first started writing songs, he noted. “We just had to remember it. Then suddenly there were cassettes, then we were working on four track instead of two track, then you got off tape, then you’ve got stereo — which we thought just made it twice as loud. We thought that was a really brilliant move.” After the Beatles came CDs, digital downloads and now video games. “I don’t really think there’s any difference. At the base of it all, there’s the song. At the base of it, there’s the music.”

And the future? “In 10 years’ time you’ll be standing there, and you will be Paul McCartney. You know that, don’t you?” He made a sound like a “Star Trek” transporter. “You’ll have a holographic case, and it will just encase you, and you will be Paul McCartney.” He paused and then said, “God knows what that will mean for me.” Then he added slyly, “I’ll be the guy on the original record.”

Correction: August 20, 2009

An article on Sunday about a new video game, Beatles: Rock Band, misattributed a comment about dreams from the book “Grapefruit,” by Yoko Ono, which compared the interactive nature of the video game to the book’s theme that art gains by being shared. It was a line within the book itself, written by Ms. Ono; it was not a blurb written for the book by John Lennon.

Daniel Radosh is a contributing editor at The Week and the author of “Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” This is his first feature article for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM26 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: While My Guitar Gently Beeps. Today's Paper|Subscribe